ABSTRACT
The stratagem that child and family come to adopt for handling the problem of their relation to others involves more than the bringing to the surface of certain mechanisms latent in their personalities. The fundamental issue of identity confronting the families of the handicapped children was how to view, interpret, and respond to the many negative meanings imputed to a visible physical handicap in our society. The uneasiness that many "normals" feel in the company of a handicapped person is bound to affect his self-concept and to complicate in many ways his feelings of relatedness to "normals" in general. The majority of the children did participate to some extent in play and games with non-handicapped children following their discharge from the hospital. Whether its primary stratagem was normalization or disassociation, however, instances of the use of both stratagems could be found in each family.
